It isn’t so often that I’m dying to read a book the second it comes out. But I got up in the wee hours of the morning the other day to read We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart as soon as humanly possible. I love her books, and this one, though very different from her others, was worth the early wakeup.

A lyrical and trim mystery with an unreliable narrator, I can only describe reading it as not unlike that weird space when you aren’t really asleep and aren’t really awake. I’d say more, but practically anything is a spoiler here. And even if I explained more about the book, I’m still not totally sure I know exactly what went down.

But hopefully it isn’t giving anything away to say the book would be really fun to use to put together a lesson series on motif or metaphor. It has recurring images and threads that would work really well on this front, and I imagine the book’s many readers would really see why the author chooses to use these devices in the context of such an unsettling story.

E. Lockhart always makes my list of books to have in the classroom for a variety of uses, and We Were Liars is no exception! I’d love to know how other folks have used mysteries in classrooms too.